


reminiscence

by aghamora



Series: Flaurel Ficlets [38]
Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 11:49:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6237436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank and Laurel take a trip down memory lane together, in the form of some old childhood photo albums.</p>
            </blockquote>





	reminiscence

It’s a chilly Saturday afternoon when Laurel comes striding into the bedroom of their apartment, her arms full of something that looks like old books, and tosses them down onto the bed with a huff.

Frank, freshly-showered and pulling on a t-shirt near the bathroom doorway, stops what he’s doing to look at her. “What’s that?”

“My parents,” she explains, placing her hands on her hips, “are divesting themselves of all mine and my sibling’s childhood memories. They sent me up these old photo albums – because, apparently, they don’t have enough space for them in their million square foot mansion anymore.”

“Real sentimental people, huh?”

She scoffs, and plops down on the bed next to the pile. “You have  _no_  idea.”

“My folks did the same thing a couple years back. I got some old ones lyin’ around here somewhere.”

“Yeah?” Laurel turns to watch him as he makes his way across the room, yanking open one of his dresser drawers and retrieving a few albums as well. “Bring them over here. We’ll have a… jolly old trip down memory lane, of our terrible, screwed-up childhoods.”

Frank shrugs and does as she says, taking a seat next to her and cracking open the first album. “Mine wasn’t so bad.”

“Your mom never  _has_ gotten the chance to show me your embarrassing naked baby pictures,” she teases. “So, better late than never. Come on. Cough them up.”

“Fine,” he relents, flipping to the front of the album in his lap. “But only if you show me yours too.”

Laurel hesitates, narrowing her eyes, before reaching into hers and withdrawing an old, yellowed photo with a flick of her wrist. “Deal.”

With that, they switch off. As soon as he sees Laurel’s photo, Frank can’t help but snicker and simultaneously melt at the sight of her. It isn’t her as an infant, but as a tiny toddler of about two or three, with dark pigtails and enormous blue eyes, and the biggest, brightest smile he’s ever seen in his life on her face. She’s wearing a daisy-yellow dress, standing in the grass next to an older girl, closer to ten, with the same dark hair but lighter eyes and sharper features.

He’s about to ask who that is when, out of nowhere, Laurel starts laughing at the picture he’d handed her – and he’s perfectly aware why. It’s the typical humiliating naked baby bathtub photo of him as an infant, all chubby cheeks and no teeth and baby fat, surrounded by bubbles and clutching a rubber duck.

“Hey,” he chides. “Don’t laugh. I was freakin’ adorable.”

Laurel quiets herself, breaking into a grin. “Sorry. Yeah, you were. You really were.”

“Who’s this?” Frank asks, pointing to the other girl in her picture.

“My sister Vanessa,” Laurel tells him. “Back when she was… less ruthless and still moderately innocent.”

“You were adorable too, y’know,” Frank remarks, then lowers his voice, abruptly serious. “We ever have a daughter one day, I hope she’ll look like you.”

She just rolls her eyes and reaches for the next photo in her album. “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself there. Oh – here. Look. A group shot of the whole, big,  _happy_  Castillo family.”

Laurel pulls it out and holds it up for him to see. It’s just like she’d said: a group shot of her family taken in some picturesque, immaculately landscaped garden, with her sister, three brothers, and parents – plus two other unidentified middle-aged women Frank has never seen before. One of them is holding the tiny toddler Laurel, with the other is clutching the hand of one of her brothers and smiling. Her parents are standing off to the side, their arms around each other, ostensibly for the sake of the photo more so than out of actual affection, not looking very much in love but looking perfectly content to be ignoring their children.

Laurel follows his gaze, and opens her mouth to explain, “Those two were our nannies. Lupita and Pilar. They raised us, not my mom or dad.”

“Sorry,” he apologizes somewhat reflexively, without really thinking about it. Laurel just shrugs.

“Don’t be. If my dad had had even a  _slight_  hand in rearing me, I wouldn’t have a normal bone in my body. Trust me.”

He almost opens his mouth to ask what could possibly be so bad, but stops himself. Even now that they’re living together and have been for months, Laurel still hasn’t given him the full truth about her father and her family, and he knows better than to press. He figures, one way or another, one day, she’ll end up trusting him enough to tell him – and he can wait until then. He doesn’t want to let Laurel’s shitty family ruin this moment anyway, and so he reaches into his album, plucking a picture out from one of the pages to change the subject.

“Yeah, well, beat this. This is me and all the Delfino cousins. All thirty-two of us.”

Laurel’s jaw drops, and she stares at it in disbelief for a moment, taking in the sea of faces, in what had been the yard in front of his grandparent’s old house in Fishtown. The Delfino cousins are, for the most part, relatively identical: all dark-haired and olive-skinned, all different shapes and sizes, and _everywhere_ , sprawled out across the grass, taking up nearly the entire frame.

“This is…  _All_ of them?”

“Yup. Us Delfino’s are good Catholics. We hump like bunnies in the name of the Lord.” He nods, then sets about naming each one of them as best he can, pointing with his finger as he goes. “That’s Vinny, Adriana, Gia, Bella, Enzo, Jacob, Tito… Lorenzo, and Lorenzo-”

“Two Lorenzo’s?”

“You bet.”

Frank is almost blue in the face by the time he’s done naming them all, and Laurel shakes her head when he finishes, shell-shocked.

“How did you guys keep track of them all?”

“We didn’t. We got two of my baby cousins mixed up once, when I was eleven. My aunts ended up takin’ the wrong kid home and didn’t realize it ‘til the next day.” Laurel laughs, just she turns her page, and one of the photos on it catches his attention. Frank reaches over and pulls it out, holding it up for her to see with a raised eyebrow. “Well, well, well. What’s this?”

Laurel is maybe ten or eleven in it. A freckled boy with sandy blonde hair about her age stands next to her, blushing bright red and leaning over to peck her on the cheek. Laurel looks like she’s mid-giggle, one leg crossed over the other, clad in jeans and a frilly pink blouse that is nothing like something she would wear now, with a pair of huge square glasses resting on her nose.

She smiles, taking it from him and looking at it more closely. “That was Zachary. He was the son of one of my dad’s business partners. We had a passionate affair that lasted for exactly two weeks, before he decided that girls had cooties again and broke my heart.”

Frank feigns surprise. “Yeah? Woulda thought you’d be the heartbreaker.”

“Oh, I was,” she quips. “With the housekeeper’s son, before that. We were four.”

“Man. You really got around.”

Laurel just shrugs. “Gotta play the field, right?”

Frank just chuckles again, and they flip through the pages for a while in relative silence, stopping every so often to comment on or make a joke about one of the pictures. Finally, after about half an hour, they reach Frank’s second photo album beginning in his adolescent years. The instant he cracks it open and the first picture comes into view – one of him at his senior prom during the infancy of his beard and awkward hair phase – Laurel dissolves into a fit of hysterical laughter.

“Oh God,” she manages to sputter. “Was that your… Was that your  _hair_?”

He pretends to grumble. “Yeah, yeah. Laugh all you want. I happened to think it looked badass.”

She stops long enough to give him an incredulous look. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, well, I mean…” he drifts off, not honestly able to argue with her over that one. “At the time.”

“You should do that again,” Laurel teases, reaching up to ruffle his damp hair. “Wear it like that to the office one day. Everyone would love it.”

“All right, hey. I didn’t make fun of you and your gigantic librarian glasses.”

Laurel stops laughing, and glares. “Those were necessary for my sight, FYI. This terrible hairdo? Was not.”

“Whatever you say,” he concedes. “As long as you won’t tell, I won’t.”

But it’s too late. Already Laurel is pulling out her phone to snap a picture of it, and moves out of reach before he can stop her, tapping the button to take one with a triumphant grin, before handing the picture back to him, having gotten all she needs.

“Oh no, I’m  _definitely_  telling. Yours is ten times worse.” Satisfied, Laurel makes her way back over to him and reaches for his photo album, flipping through the pages more eagerly now. “Any other… interesting hair styles in here I should be aware of? Did you ever have a fauxhawk? Or a-”

Suddenly she falls silent, her eyes trained on something he can’t see. Frank frowns, and leans over to see what she’s looking at, finding her eyes on another one of the pictures. At first he can’t see why it would have such an effect on her – but then he looks closer, and sees who is in the picture, and freezes.

He’s about to open his mouth to explain when Laurel holds up the photograph instead, brow furrowed, voice soft.

“She’s pretty. Who was she?”

Frank hesitates. Laurel doesn’t look mad, but he can’t be sure that means she isn’t, and so for a moment he doesn’t answer, just takes in the picture without a word, a thousand memories flooding back to him at once. It’s one he’d put in there himself, years ago. He’s standing next to a laughing woman in it; dark-haired, slender, beautiful, his arm around her waist and his face turned towards hers like he’s only seconds away from leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. It had been in New York, he remembers that. Near the Statue of Liberty, though the inept passerby they’d asked to take their picture had failed to get even part of it in the shot. It had been back in his less-than-stellar hair days, ten years ago, when all he’d had in his closet were clothes from Men’s Warehouse and Annalise was still referring to him as her secretary.

“Kennedy,” he finally answers, a bit apprehensive. “One of my exes.”

Understanding flickers in her eyes. “A student?”

He tenses, but doesn’t lie. “Yeah.” One of the first.  _The_  first, in fact.

Laurel notices his uneasiness, and rolls her eyes. “Frank, I know you’ve dated other students besides me. You don’t have to be all weird about it.”

At that, he finally relaxes. “Just didn’t know if you’d be mad or not.”

“I’m not mad,” she promises, then turns her eyes back to the picture. “But…  _wow_.”

He frowns. “Wow what?”

“Nothing.” Laurel says, shrugging. “Just… you have a type.”

“A what?”

“A  _type_. Big time.”

He scoffs. “I don’t have a type, okay? That’s ridiculous.”

Laurel doesn’t reply. Instead, she just holds the photo up next to her so that hers and Kennedy’s faces are side by side, and stares at him without a word, eyebrows raised expectantly. It’s only then, looking at the two of them, both brunette, both beautiful, both petite, both with the same intelligent eyes and same features, and even a similar smile…

Oh. Fuck.

“Holy shit,” he mutters in disbelief, reaching out to take the photo into his own hands. “I do have a type.”

Laurel smiles and moves in closer, resting her head lightly on his shoulder. “She was rich too, I’m guessing. With a name like Kennedy.”

“Her folks were loaded. I remember…” he drifts off, shaking his head. “You’re right.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. So your type is rich, beautiful, smart brunettes. My type is…”

He sets down the picture, turning his full attention to her. “Yeah? What’s your type?”

“Lumbersexuals, probably. Hot, rugged guys with beards. Speaking of,” she says, and pinches a bit of his shirt for emphasis, “You should wear plaid more often.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He pecks her on the top of the head, grinning. “Glad you’re not pissed, though.”

“Why would I be?” she asks with a shrug. “We both know we’ve dated other people before. In my case… apparently the majority of my romantic entanglements took place before the age of twelve. But still.”

Frank chuckles, then grows abruptly serious and draws back, so that she’s forced to pull away from his shoulder and look him in the eyes.

“Let’s put all this away,” he suggests suddenly, nodding down at the photo albums.

She blinks. “Why?”

“’Cause,” Frank murmurs, as he wraps an arm around her and draws her against his chest once again, “all that stuff in there… all those years, and everything I did… It don’t matter, now.”

“Frank-”

“It was all before you,” he continues, his voice low, dripping with sincerity. “And far as I’m concerned, I didn’t  _have_  a life before you. Not one that meant anything, anyway.”

Laurel hums contently when he presses another kiss to her hair, and smiles. “Mmm. Well, you know what?”

He glances down at her. “What?”

“We’ll start our own photo album. And fill it up with pictures of us…” She pauses, and kisses his shoulder, so beautiful right then that his breath catches in his throat. “And it’ll be better than all these combined, someday.”

Frank doesn’t say anything. He just kisses her again, draws her closer, holds her tighter – because he loves the idea of that, of a future with Laurel, of  _years_  with Laurel, enough to fill up fifty photo albums with a million happy memories. 

He loves the idea of that. He really, _really_  does.


End file.
